Card recommendations

[Roo]

On Sat, 09 Sep 2006 17:53:29 +0200, René Rebe wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Sep 9, 2006, at 8:23 AM, Yogesh M wrote:
> 
>> On 9/8/06, Ian Grant <Ian.Grant at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> Can anyone recommend a video card or cards for use with Xorg and
>>> Windows in single, dual-head and single logical-display-on-two-
>>> monitors configurations? I want one that has open source, well-
>>> supported, bug-free drivers available for X.Org 6.9 and onwards running
>>> on ix86 and x86_64 machines. I don't need top of the range performance,
>>> just something that works well that I can forget about.
>>
>> I've been using nvidia card (FX5200) for single desktop spanning on two
>> monitors without any problem on Linux as well as Windows. Also the newer
>> drivers are much stable and fast doing composite stuff.
> 
> well - as usual I like to comment this with: Do not feed NVidia as the the
> binary only driver is not available for all so many architectures
> including my favorite PowerPC/PowerPC64.
> 
> Please try to choose a chip with full open source driver :-)

<cough>

I had a Matrox G550 -- and was proud of the fact that I was running an
exclusively Free software stack. However, when going to from Fedora Core 4
to Fedora Core 5 (which had a major GTK upgrade to use Cairo, and to xorg
7.0)... it suffered a major performance regression.

I still don't know whether it is because Cairo is slower (), more of GTK
typically awesomely poor performance, or whether newer the xorg just sucks.
I've had conflicting answers and lots of finger pointing and claims about
EXA sorting everything out. 

In the end, I gave up on my FOSS-driven Matrox and dumped it... I
scavenged an NVIDIA Geforce 4 from a friend's old machine and am happily
using NVIDIA's binary drivers.

And those don't suck. If it was Cairo, it may still be a slower than it
would have been... but it's a faster card, so I don't notice it so much.

So anyway, you'll have to forgive my slight intolerance for lectures on
using Free software drivers. I didn't do me much good.


BTW: I'd like to apologise to the two people who emailed me a few days
ago about my original Matrox problem report here. 

Re: Performance change from X in Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5

They are also Matrox users and needed some information on whether I'd got
any useful information out of my query. My ISP did some work at my local
telephone exchange (so-called LLU -- basically they took over management
of my line from British Telecom), and took me offline for two weeks
because their engineers would have trouble changing a light bulb.